LIST OF PANELS

Many metropolises  like New York City make use of multi-scalar institutional networks for regional policy planning and implementation governing 20 million inhabitants, 4 states, dozens of  regional financial entities,, hundreds of counties, school districts, utility districts – all intersecting with the federal government, supranational and transnational policy constellations. These institutional policymaking ensembles accommodate  multi-layered and multi-scalar coordinated  reflexive network arrangements, and the accompanying transversal negotiations of co-regulation that makes for the interconnectedness sustaining global value chains, global supply chains, global distribution chains, and global ecology. Globalization results in more than global capitalism, it is the world-wide realization of the cognitive demands of functional differentiation. This panel studies the emerging generalized patterns of coordinating transnational policy regimes (TPRs). The panel explores whether such multi-layered and multi-scalared TPRs with more looped and iterative (less linear) path dependency  establish a referent  of network purpose, benchmarking and triggered threshold sanctions to help rein in the excesses of functional differentiation gone amok: e.g, in innovation policy, forest restoration, central bankers’ financial regulation, biofuels, disposal of contaminants, water governance, fisheries, emission trading schemes. These multi-layered and multi-scalar TPNs manifest an ontology based on needs, inter-connexions among them, and the webs that they form.  A growing literature has tried to provide a theoretical underpinning of the interdependencies between the subnational, the national, the intergovernmental, the  supranational and TPRs.beyond ad hoc exceptional practices. The panel’s focus is on the nodes and inter-connexions that transverse a rhizomic differentiation into nested and entangled scales. Specifically, our focus on multi-scalarity centers on the problematic of “getting the scale right.” In so doing, the panel is accented with the Territory, Place, Scale, Network (TPSN) Framework of Jessop, Brenner and Jones (2008) with its emphasis on space rather than place, as well as scale rather than level in studying networks of networks.

The panel tests the TPSN Framework (“Territory, Place, Scale, Network Framework”of B. Jessop, N. Brenner and M. Jones, 2008) utilizing the critical systems theory --associated with Günther Teubner’s Normative Orders cluster initiative at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt/a.M. -- to provide a critical turn in Niklas Luhmann’s analysis of autopoietic systems in accounting for the “network purpose” in TPRs’ response to accelerating functional differentiation on a global-wide basis. We study the dialectics between  the purposes of systemic practical reasoning and actual ongoing negotiated practices. The heuristic intention of the panel is to extend the TPSN Framework by conceptualizing transnational network organization’s negotiating practices/processes as emergent normativity that crosses borders and diffuses regionally and globally transnational standards, rules, and both autonomous private law regimes as well as autonomous social law spheres. In so doing, the panel re-works the R?gulationist Approach of Robert Boyer’s Paris School regarding bounded, interlinked and iterated rational policy dynamics in the study of particular r?glementations (i.e, discrete agreements) at different scales. And is so doing we take institutionalism to a new “ground.”